Cheating at Solitaire

by Jane Haddam

  9

  In the middle of it, plowing through drifting snow in her calf-high black suede L.L. Bean snow boots, Annabeth Falmer began to wonder if she’d been out of her mind. It was one thing to have a sense of responsibility, to feel that it w asn’t right to leave somebody to die in the cold when you had the capacity to see if you could help him. It was another to go blundering around when you had no hope of providing assistance at all. It had been many years since Annabeth had been out in a storm like this. She didn’t like to drive in snow, and wasn’t good at it, so when it got like this at home she always just stayed put with Creamsicle and her tea. She wondered if it was worse here because of the sea. She seemed to remember something about the Gulf Stream, which she was sure didn’t come all the way in to Cape Cod. She wished she’d pulled out a snow hat and made Stewart Gordon put it on his very bald head.

  “I can see it,” he shouted back at her.

  He wasn’t really very far away. He always stopped and checked to make sure she was coming on. She sped up a little now, still thinking about the hat.

  “There it is,” he said when she pulled up next to him. “They must have spun out. It’s pointing the wrong way for this side of the road.”

  She followed the line of his outstretched hand and saw it: an enormous pickup truck with oversized wheels, painted a violent and uncompromising purple.

  “My God,” she said. “Has somebody been driving that thing around town? You’d think I’d have noticed it.”

  “He’s been driving it around some, yes,” Stewart Gordon said. “It’s Mark Anderman’s.”

  “Who’s Mark Anderman?”

  “I told you, up at the house. Arrow’s latest boyfriend. Not the guy she married, and not the one after that, but a new one. Maybe a couple of weeks old. She met him on the set.”

  “And he’s probably in there.”

  “No way to tell from here. Why don’t you stay up here and let me go down and see?”

  Annabeth Falmer was not a woman most men had found a need to protect, but she recognized the impulse when she saw it. She wondered what he was protecting her from: the climb down, or the fact that this Mark Anderman was very probably lying in the driver’s seat stone-cold dead. Either way, she didn’t want to be protected. When Stewart Gordon started down the long bank toward the pickup truck and the beach, she followed him.

  It was a bad climb down. Margaret’s Harbor was not Maui. It was not a gentle place. The slopes that led from the roads to the sea were covered with scattered rocks, and steep. Annabeth kept hitting her ankles against hard things, and sinking her legs far into the snow so that the wet came in over the tops of her boots. The sea would have been beautiful if she hadn’t been so afraid of it. It reminded her of that poem by Matthew Arnold, of the death of religious faith, with the waves crashing against the shore under the great white chalk cliffs of Dover.

  They were almost at the truck. Stewart Gordon had stopped to wait for her. “What were you thinking about? You looked like you were thinking about something.”

  “I was thinking about trying to write in my office at home when the boys were small, and it would be so cold I’d try to type with gloves on, and it wouldn’t work,” Annabeth said. “It would go down to three degrees Fahrenheit and nothing I did could make the house warm, and I’d be aware all the time, you know, because heat’s expensive and I’d be running it at full blast, that the bill was going to come in and I wasn’t going to be able to pay it. But it was so cold I pumped it up anyway, and then it took forever to get my work done, because it was so hard to type.”

  “And your husband? What did he do?”

  “Oh, he was dead by then. He died when the boys were small. Three and seven, I think they were. He—my husband, I mean—he worked with computers and things.”

  “And your sons are now grown up and they’re, what—a doctor and a lawyer?”

  “A cardiologist and a litigator, yes.”

  “And they like you enough to buy you a house on Margaret’s Harbor just because you wanted to spend a year to read?”

  “I should have thought of going to Italy. I like Italy. I’ve been thinking of writing a book about Italy. About Lucrezia Borgia, maybe. At least there wouldn’t be this kind of snow.”

  “That’s very impressive.”

  “A book about Lucrezia Borgia?”

  “No. The fact that your sons like you enough to set you up this way after you did whatever it was you had to do to get them where they are. I’ve seen women like that. Most of them survive by getting hard. You didn’t.”

  “How do you know I wasn’t set up with enough life insurance to choke a horse?”

  “The fact that you were afraid of paying the heating bills.”

  “Fair enough,” Annabeth said. “I was thinking of something else, though. While we were coming down. There’s a poem by Matthew Arnold, called ‘Dover Beach.’ ”

  “‘… for the world, which seems

  To lie before us like a land of dreams,

  So various, so beautiful, so new,

  Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

  Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

  And we are here as on a darkling plain

  Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

  Where ignorant armies clash by night.’”

  Annabeth stopped still. “Exactly,” she said. “That’s amazing. Very few people know that poem. Even English majors of my generation—our generation, really, I’m fifty-five and I seem to remember—”

  “Sixty-two.”

  “Yes, well, even English majors of our generation weren’t asked to read that, and nobody else ever does except in graduate school. Maybe it was different in England—”

  “Scotland,” Stewart Gordon said. “I’m Scots. You’ve got to keep that straight, or men in kilts will storm your door and beat on it with large swords.”

  “Right,” Annabeth said.

  “But you didn’t go to graduate school in English literature, did you? It must have been history.”

  “Oh, it was. But then I taught as an adjunct for a while in a small place and they had me teaching everything. They put it in textbooks for undergraduates now. ‘Dover Beach,’ I mean. And, you know, I know that the night of the poem isn’t supposed to be a storm. The moon is out. But then there’s all that at the end, and it just feels more like a night like tonight. I’m babbling.”

  “No. You’re doing what I’m doing. You’re slowing down as we approach the goal.”

  “He’s going to be dead in there, isn’t he?”

  “Probably. There’s no telling how long he’s been in the cold. If we could have gotten some sense out of Arrow, we might have a rough idea when it was the accident happened, but as it is, as far as we know, it could have been hours. It could have been any time since about eleven this morning.”

  “Why eleven this morning?”

  “That’s when they threw Arrow off the set and she took off with Mark. Both of them, by the way, already fairly out of it. Not to say she was as out of it as she pretended to be at your place.”

  “Did you think she was faking? I thought she was faking. I just couldn’t figure out why I thought that.”

  “You thought it because she’s a damned piss-poor actress,” Stewart Gordon said. “I thought about pushing it, but I didn’t see the point. There’s one thing all those girls are good at, and Arrow in particular, and that’s turning mulish and shutting up. It made more sense to come out and see. Here we are. We’re not going to be able to get to the door on the passenger’s side. The trade is almost rolled over onto it and it’s jammed against even more rocks. This place is unbelievable with rocks. It’s worse than the shingle at Brighton.”

  “We’ll have to climb up to the driver’s door,” Annabeth said.

  “I’ll do it. Later on, I’m going to put a shot of Scotch into your tea and tell you why Arrow Normand is the inevitable product of late-stage corporate capitalism. That was a go
od book, the one about Abigail Adams, but your understanding of economics is up your ass.”

  “Right,” Annabeth said.

  Stewart Gordon had been pulling himself up to the truck’s driver’s-side door all the time he’d been lecturing her about Arrow, rocks, and capitalism. The windshield was frosted over, but they could see well enough through it to see that there was a man in there, and blood. Annabeth thought about the blood in Arrow Normand’s hair, and then she thought of something else.

  “You know,” she said. “This truck is practically on its side.”

  “I can see that.”

  “I know you can. It’s just—she must have climbed out. Arrow Normand, I mean. She can’t have been thrown from the truck, which is what I thought she said. She must have climbed out. Except, I don’t know. That doesn’t make any sense.”

  “Huh,” Stewart Gordon said. “Stand back a little. If the door is frozen shut, it’s going to take a good yank to get it free.”

  Annabeth stood back. Stewart Gordon yanked. He yanked again. Annabeth came forward a little and touched his arm.

  “Look,” she said. “The little post thingee, the thing that locks the door. It’s down.”

  Stewart Gordon stopped and looked.

  “That doesn’t make sense either, does it?” Annabeth asked him. “I mean, she couldn’t have been thrown from the truck if the door was locked, and the door wouldn’t lock itself. And I can’t imagine that she thought to lock it while she was climbing out.”

  “Just a minute,” Stewart Gordon said. He leaned over and went at the windshield with the side of his arm, brushing off the thin layer of frost in great leaping arcs. The wind was getting worse. Annabeth thought that it was coming straight through her coat and going out the other side.

  Stewart Gordon grunted, and stepped back again, staying on top of the truck so that he looked like some kind of fearsome statue in honor of something—Annabeth was very aware that she was making no sense. Stewart Gordon had his hands in his pockets and was looking straight down. Annabeth moved slowly and got herself onto the truck, scared to death that she would slide off into the snow and then need rescuing herself. She got up next to him without his making any sign that he was aware she was coming. She looked down and saw the streaks of red and something else everywhere.

  “He hit his head,” she said. “But that doesn’t mean anything, does it? Head wounds give a lot of blood, even minor ones. He could still be alive.”

  “He’s not alive,” Stewart Gordon said.

  “How do you know? We ought to at least check.”

  “We’re not going to check anything. We’re not going to touch anything. We’re going to go get the police no matter how busy they are in the storm. We’re going to get them now.”

  “We should get an ambulance, just in case,” Annabeth insisted—and yet, even as she insisted, she knew that he was right and she was wrong. Here it was, she thought, here it was, those ignorant armies clashing by night. Except that it wasn’t night. It was only late afternoon. If she looked hard enough she could still find the sun behind the dark clouds that choked the sky. That was why they could see the purple of the truck, where it was exposed.

  She was about to ask him why so much of the purple of the truck had not been covered by falling snow when he stepped back again, turned to her, and said, “He didn’t hit his head. Somebody put a gunshot through it.”

  Part I

  Chapter One

  1

  Gregor Demarkian had been born and brought up on Ca-vanaugh Street, and married there when he was in his twenties. He knew everything there was to know about how this place reacted to the expectation of a marriage, right down to the superstitious things the Very Old Ladies would do in the privacy of their living rooms when Father Tibor Kasparian wasn’t around to scold them. He had no idea why he had thought things would be different, now, for him. Maybe it was that Cavanaugh Street was so very changed from the way it had been when he had grown up here. There had been a lot of rising tides raising boats in the course of that something-more-than-half-century, and what had started as a cramped blank space of tenements and peeling paint had ended, now, as one of the most upscale gentrified neighborhoods in the city of Philadelphia. The building where Gregor had been born didn’t even exist anymore. Howard Kashinian’s development company had had it torn down, nearly a decade before Gregor moved back to the street, and replaced it with three four-story brick town houses, each offering a single long apartment on each of its four floors. The disintegrating brown-stone where Lida Kazanjian Arkmanian had been brought up did exist, but the fifteen other families that had lived there were gone, and Lida had bought the place, had it gutted, and turned it into a showplace that had been featured on the cover of Metropolitan Home. It was a different world, with different expectations. These days the wives expected to spend their winter vacations in the Bahamas and the children expected to go to college when their time came—and a good college, too, not just whatever was on offer locally in the community college system. Sheila and Howard Kashinian’s daughter Deanna had had a huge, expensive party for her sixteenth birthday that was featured on a televison show called My Super Sweet Sixteen. Elda and Michael Valadanian’s son David had just been appointed, at thirty-two, the youngest federal court judge in the history of the Eleventh Circuit. Susan Kasmanian, Hannah Kasmanian’s niece, had been accepted to study for a doctorate in mathematics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. This was not the kind of place that insisted on wrapping up the bride and groom in flower garlands so that widows could spit on them for luck.

  Maybe Gregor had simply assumed that all that kind of thing would be ignored because the woman he was marrying was not herself Armenian. In fact, Bennis Hannaford was nearly the polar opposite of Armenian, in spite of the fact that she was eerily small and dark, as if in revolt against generations of tall, pale, blond English ancestors. She was a Hannaford of the Main Line Hannafords. That great pile of a house was still sitting out there, in Bryn Mawr, waiting for her brothers to decide what to do with it. She had come out at the Philadelphia Assemblies. She had graduated from Agnes Irwin and Vassar. She even sounded more like Katharine Hepburn than anybody else Gregor had ever heard. He couldn’t imagine anybody thinking she could spit on Bennis for any reason at all, and he had a sneaking suspicion that before she allowed herself to be wrapped in flower garlands, Bennis would insist on being naked.

  Still, here he was, on the second of January, months before there was going to be anything like an actual wedding, letting Donna Moradanyan Donahue wrap a tape measure around his head.

  “Stop making such a fuss,” she said. “I’m the one who should be screaming bloody murder. I’ve just had a baby.”

  “That’s true,” Gregor said. “You should be home with Martha Grace. You should be fighting with your mother-in-law about what church she’s going to be baptized into.”

  “I’m letting Russ fight with his mother,” Donna said. “It’s counterproductive when I do it. I just need to get the proportions right here. I mean, you don’t want your head to be up on Lida’s roof looking like Charles Manson or something, do you?”

  “I don’t want my head up on Lida’s roof at all. And you can’t claim this is some kind of Armenian tradition, because I know better.”

  “It’s my tradition,” Donna said. “Just wait till you see what I do for the wedding. I’m going to cover the entire street. Well, except for the church. Father Tibor—”

  “You cannot wrap the church in shiny paper,” Tibor said. “It’s not respectful.”

  “I wouldn’t think it would even be possible,” Gregor said.

  “It won’t matter,” Donna said. “The church will have lots of flowers. We’re going to have banks of them going down the stairs straight to the sidewalk. We’ve got to work on your entrance, though. Usually there are limousines, and that does for ceremony, but with both of you coming from the same street, we’ll have to think of something else. Maybe we can work up one o
f those processions with children, you know, that they have in the villages. I always think those look beautiful.”

  “That is because you have never had to live in a village,” Father Tibor said.

  “Here’s more coffee,” Linda Melajian said, putting the pot down in the middle of the table. “Bennis called to say she’s going to be held up at the lawyers this morning, and you’re supposed to stop complaining.”

  Linda Melajian stomped off, and Gregor watched her go. It was nearly noon now, and outside the big plate glass windows of the Ararat Restaurant, Cavanaugh Street looked clean and cold and mostly empty. Donna had finished her measure-ments and wrapped the tape measure around her hand, and she pushed against him a little to give her room to sit down. The remains of the lunches Gregor and Father Tibor had tried to eat were still sitting on the table. Father Tibor never ate much, but Gregor used to, until all this thing with the wedding. Now he’d left a great big stack of grape leaves stuffed with lamb sitting on the plate, and Donna Moradan-yan started picking at them.

  Sometimes—and, for some reason, much oftener now—Gregor Demarkian thought that Cavanaugh Street was someplace he had imagined for himself on the worst and darkest days of his life. It wasn’t someplace real. He would wake up in an hour or two and find himself still in that awful apartment near the Beltway, the place he had gone to wait for Elizabeth to die. Then he would turn over in bed and look at the numbers on the clock he had always set for five, so that he could be at the hospital before she woke up, if she woke up. Day after day, week after week, for almost a year, with nothing else to think about, and nothing else in his life. It was when he had first realized that he was not good at making friends or keeping them. He was too closed in on himself, and for all the time between the day he had married Elizabeth and the day she had died, he had lived as if they were the only two people in the world. Work didn’t count. Work was something he was good at, but when he walked away from it, it was as if it had never been.